Qualify Calls | Enhance Selling Techniques for Phone Agents

Today, more than ever, businesses heavily rely on a sales force comprised of call center agents. Having staff that can utilize adaptive selling techniques and modify their sales behavior during a conversation with a customer is critical to an organization’s ongoing success. With mobile search available at most people’s fingertips, customers are becoming more informed and adept consumers.

To enhance your sales agents adaptive selling skills, the first step to enable support is to qualify calls coming into your call center. By arming your agents with specific customer knowledge to be able to personalize interactions and appropriately categorize the client type, lets agents quickly adjust their sales approach to reflect the specific need of the lead or customer.

By using CallerReady’s automated call distribution system, custom IVR menus can provide an interactive guide to qualify the callers intent and route accordingly to the correct agent or department. When you qualify calls and prioritize, sales agents can be prepared with the lead data gathered to initiate the most appropriate selling technique for the situation or request.

For effective soft-skills, there are four key areas that sales agents should always be trained on to increase their adaptive selling techniques:

Empathy:

Agents need to understand and identify with a customer’s needs. Being able to communicate empathy and make personalized connections facilitates in their ability to effectively problem solve, convert and upsell. Train agents to think of the situation or conversation from the customer perspective and to try and understand their needs and desires.

Maintaining Control:

Great sales agents are able to take control of the sales conversation with confidence to lead customers through a successful sales transaction. Training should incorporate guidelines for how agents can anticipate customer needs and be able to lead them in a favorable direction without the customer steering the conversation.

Behavior Matching:

Adapting sales behavior to customer characteristics and specific situations is essential. If a customer is rushed or impatient, an agent should instantly notice and adapt their pitch to be concise and to the point. If agents are trained to be aware of tone and customer attitude, they can change course and their selling behavior to appropriately mirror and adapt to the customer.

Build Rapport:

Great agents don’t just sell a product, they sell relationships. Being able to quickly build and establish trust is the best opportunity an agent can have to secure a sale. In training, agents need to be shown how to build an alliance with a lead or customer and how to have a conversation in collaboration with them to find a solution or solve their problem.

As an organization, if you qualify calls and have a highly skilled staff in adaptive selling techniques, conversion rates and profitability will rise. To find out how to implement automated call distribution, contact a member of our team for details.